★★½ 2.5/4 Although sports movies generally offer one of two endings for the protagonist—win or lose—the true outcome is seldom so binary. Face it; in Hollywood, even the Losers win. Moral victory, spiritual victory, validatory victory—it’s rare when the big third-act contest ends as an utter and unequivocal defeat, the protagonist lying on the ground a shattered, bleeding, weeping sack of crushed humanity. After all, this is America. We don’t like losers. (Helps to imagine the previous two sentences spoken in a Trump accent. If you can stomach it, that is.) This proliferation of formula, though, makes the Rocky franchise interesting to contemplate. While the films themselves consistently indulge in either the win or lose-but-really-win blueprint, the overall character arc of Rocky Balboa doesn’t strictly adhere to any well-worn guidelines. Rocky always seems to be a little worse off than when we last saw him; get to the end of one Rocky movie and there’s a good chance that things will be all shitty for the guy by the time the next one starts. No comfort arises from a freeze frame of Balboa standing arms raised and triumphant in the ring—the further along in his series we go, the more [...]